It is easy to form a
distorted impression of the growth of the Anglo-Catholic Movement in the Church
of England and those churches in communion with it. The dramatic story is that
of the Oxford Movement. The dramatic character is Newman. The dramatic moment is
his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Evangelicals, Low and Broad Churchmen, and
Roman Catholics, have always seen the movement as a Romanizing one, reflecting
in its theology and ritual orthodox Roman Catholicism, and have defined its
objectives as implying submission to Rome as a necessary consequence.
Nothing could be less true. Even to this day, many Anglo-Catholic clergy have
never been inside a Roman Catholic Church or read a Romanist theological
work written after the Council of Trent.

The growth and
development of modern Anglicanism stems from seeds dormant in the Anglican
church from its beginning. Newmans theory of development of doctrine may or may
not apply to the evolution of post-Tridentine dogma, but it certainly applies to
the Church he left. On the other hand, the influence of the Oxford Movement, and
the ritualist revival which succeeded it, has had a profound influence on Roman
Catholicism and Lutheranism all through the latter part of the nineteenth
century and the early part of the twentieth.

Today the devotional and
liturgical life of both Protestantism and Catholicism have been assimilated to a
worldwide movement of purification and restoration which unquestionably first
began with the Oxford reform. This influence of course did not only operate
externally. Again and again Catholicizing priests, and sometimes whole religious
orders, swam the Tiber from Canterbury to Rome, having lost hope of
defending the Catholic heritage of the Church of England against militant
Protestants, politically-appointed bishops and a secular Parliament. Once they
got there however, many of their old practices and beliefs slowly reasserted
themselves and acted to purge the Roman Catholic Church in England of many of
the distortions and abuses and superstitions which had crept into the practices
of the Church in the long dormant period of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.

Looking back over the
controversies that drove many an embattled and despairing priest to renounce the
Anglican Communion and deny the validity of his own priesthood, and even
question that of his baptism, it is tragic and ironic to realize that many,
perhaps most, of these were over points of practice and doctrine then considered
hopelessly Protestant or even sacrilegious which are now common in the Roman
Catholic Church since Vatican II  the vernacular liturgy, open communion,
communion in both kinds, birth control, divorce, married clergy, the
redefinition of scriptural, traditional and magisterial authority, of baptismal
regeneration, and justification. Once the now apparently inevitable permission
for a married clergy is granted, many Anglican and even some Lutheran churches
and priests and ministers will be considerably more High Church than their
Roman Catholic fellows.

The importance of
Anglican Catholicism is precisely that it worked out, for over a
century in a far from authoritarian environment, most of the implications of a
free Catholicism and demonstrated that even in so touchy a subject as the Higher
Criticism of scripture, liberty was the mother, not the daughter, of order; that
at the end of the process of freedom for development within a Catholic context,
hardly defined except as a way of life based on a way of prayer, true Catholic
orthodoxy would not be weakened but immeasurably strengthened. It is for this
reason that the developments in Anglicanism since the beginning of the Oxford
Movement are of such crucial importance and are so illuminating of the problems
now confronting the Universal Church.

In all this history the
coming and going of John Henry Cardinal Newman is only a minor episode. It would
be tempting to be defiant and try to write the story of the Oxford Movement
without mentioning him. That would be a foolish thing to do. Distortions of
history cannot be corrected by equal and opposite distortions. It should be
borne in mind in studying the Oxford Movement that Newman is a separate problem,
just as it should be apparent on inspection that he represents a divergent
tendency. He went to Rome. The other leaders did not. Certainly it was after
his conversion that he became that special theological and even philosophical
influence that is his unique contribution.

Historians of the
Movement commonly represent it as saving the English Church from an abysm of
sloth, indifference, simony, slovenliness, and secularization, into which it had
sunk in the eighteenth century. This is only partially true, and it was nothing
peculiar to the Church of England, but characteristic of religion in
eighteenth-century Western civilization taken as a whole. The eighteenth century
was not only the heyday of a secularizing rationalism, but it was the heyday of
Erastianism as well. The State was supreme in secular affairs in Sweden as well
as in Bavaria; in Prussia as in Spain; obviously, as we all know, in France and
England, but also, as we forget, in Rome.

In the Papal States the
State as such was as value neuter as anywhere else. It was just far less
efficient than most, and was responsible for the Balkanization of central and
southern Italy. Had the Borgias established the Papacy as a hereditary monarchy,
things might have been different, but since the secular power of the Papacy was
actually powerlessness, the Papal States were the victims of the maneuvering of
great powers whose interest it was to keep the heart of Italy barbarous and
weak. We forget that only a few generations ago the city of Rome was a
wilderness of half-buried classical ruins, ill-kempt churches, ruinous
Renaissance palaces, cow pastures and slums. The Light never went out in the
Church, true. But it never went out in Canterbury either, although in both cases
its rays shone far more from the Inner Light than from the radiance of the
cathedra.

We forget too, that
William of Orange was an aggressive Presbyterian and Calvinist publicly, and
devoid of religion privately, and that from the death of Queen Anne the throne
of England has been occupied, until recent years, by rulers who were not really
members of the Church of England at all, as it had been defined by the
Elizabethan Establishment, or by the great theologians of the Elizabethan,
Jacobean and Caroline days. For two hundred years the entire tendency of the
secular authority, whether throne or Parliament, was against the Anglican
heritage. This did not mean that the heritage was forgotten, or that the
Christian life died out, or went underground in the eighteenth century.

Samuel Johnson is a
perfect example of a devout but worldly Anglican layman of those times. His
religious opinions and prejudices can be found in Boswell, distorted by
Boswells worldly and secular bias  as is the whole Boswell-Johnson  but his
religious life is revealed in the rare entries in his diary, always at least at
Easter, the anniversary of his wifes death, and usually his own birthday and
New Years Day and in his prayers and few personal poems. True, he only went to
communion on Easter. Thats all anybody else did, anywhere, except for a few
specially devout persons and members of religious orders. Coleridge is another
example at the end of the century. As a theologian and philosopher he may be
very confused, but the tremendous importance of religion in his life could not
have existed in a completely irreligious milieu, nor even grown out of it by
reaction.

Religious life in the
Church of England was pretty well confined to the Nonjurors, the Evangelicals,
the old High Church party and the pietists who were influenced by French
Quietism, German piety, and the writings of William Law. Again the eighteenth
century was the flowering time of Quaker piety, when Quakerism turned from an
apocalyptic Pentecostal sect into a society of lay monastics. The printed
literature of spiritual diaries kept by Friends in the eighteenth century is
immense, and reveals the continued existence in England on a very wide scale of
that lay monasticism that is the characteristic form of the English religious
life. Of course the Society of Friends were a people apart, an alternative
society; nevertheless, they existed within the dominant culture, would have been
something very different without it, and radiated an influence all about them.

This kind of devoted,
concerned Friends call it, life appears in the first English religious
writing. It can be found in Bede as well as Walter Hilton, The Cloud of
Unknowing, Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle, Marjorie Kempe and all the
other great English mystics of the end of the Middle Ages. It can be found in
the devotional literature of the English families who remained true to the old
religion, and where, in an underground church, the religious life was
necessarily the family life. It can be found in the poetry of Herbert, Henry
Vaughan, and even Herrick, and it is perfectly expressed in Waltons Lives
of Donne, Herbert, Sanderson, Hooker, Wotten. All of them were distinguished by
a domestic monasticism, a cheerful piety and a gentleness of disposition. At
least three of them  Donne, Wotten and Herbert  were fishermen, wanderers by
quiet streams and flowered meadows, contemplating the mysteries of life in
moving water. The Compleat Angler itself is a book about the
contemplative life, under the symbolism of fishing. This is not a witticism.

To understand the
profound changes which took place in the Church of England through the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it is necessary to establish the
sympathy of a special mood, and that mood can be found in Ropers Life of Sir
Thomas More and in The Compleat Angler as well. Englands special
contribution to monasticism was the Order of St. Gilbert of Sempringham. The
Gilbertine villages or city communities were organized with a convent of nuns at
one end and of monks, both contemplative and active, at the other, and in
between the homes of lay monastics whose religious life was the fulfilment of
family life. I myself have always hoped to see, amongst the many other revivals
of a purified medieval monasticism within the Anglican Church, a revival of the
Gilbertines. Perhaps as we enter the Apocalypse that will be the final
resolution of aggiornamento.

Contrary to popular
belief, Henry VIII was not interested in founding a Church of England. Nor
was he interested in reforming the Church. He was interested in robbing it. The
looting of the monasteries was occasioned by the impending bankruptcy of a
vastly overextended international policy. The coming and going of Henrys wives
reflected political forces, and policies national and international, not unlike
the coming and going of prime ministers in later days. As Henrys chancellors
and queens succeeded each other, the doctrinal position of the Church under its
royal head swung like a pendulum. As long as Henry was alive it did not swing
very far. The succession of official formularies from the parliamentary
declarations of 1529 to 1536 summed up in the Ten Articles, The Institution
of a Christian Man (The Bishops Book), the Act of Six Articles, 1539,
The Necessary Doctrine and Erudition of a Christian Man (The Kings Book,
1543), Archbishop Cranmers Primer issued in the last year of Henrys
life, were all considerably more orthodox and more specifically Roman than much
of the liturgics and theology popular since Vatican II  always saving the
Royal Supremacy. It should be borne in mind that quarrels of king and throne
were nothing new in the history of either the Western or Eastern Church. The
extreme lengths to which Henry had pushed the Royal Supremacy fell far short of
the claims of most Byzantine emperors. Had the personal revolt of Henry VIII not
coincided with the Reformation on the continent and the attendant political
struggles of the German states, France, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, the
schism of the English Church would have quietly healed over with changes in the
occupants and policies of the throne. The Communion Service of the first Prayer
Book of Edward VI was still unmistakably a Mass. Even the second Prayer Book was
susceptible of a Catholic interpretation and would be reformed drastically in
that sense by Elizabeths bishops.

There was a great deal of
iconoclasm and destruction throughout all these years, but it is extraordinary
how much of the artistic heritage of the Middle Ages survived to be destroyed by
the Protestant revolt in the next century. Nothing shows the comparative
superficiality of the Henrician and Edwardian Reformation than the comparative
ease with which Mary was able to restore the Roman obedience. The persecutions
of Mary have made her name a household word. In fact the majority of the clergy
and the vast majority of the populace quietly submitted. Serious revolt did not
begin until the marriage to Philip of Spain.

In those years the
Council of Trent was in session (1545-1563) and those doctrines that we think of
as specifically Roman were then far more rigorously defined. The council did not
attempt to ameliorate any of the differences with the reformers, but attacked
them head on. Practices and doctrines that were peculiar to the contemporary
Western Church were made binding for all times and places. Behind its
counterattack in the field, the Church became a fortress church. What this meant
in actual fact was that what had hitherto been considered the Universal Church,
the body of all Christian men, synonymous with society as a whole, in Western
Europe at least, accepted a position as a subculture or a sect. As on the
continent, many of the persecutions and burnings of the later days of Marys
reign were for doctrines and practices which had been matters of dispute amongst
the fathers and doctors of the Church until the sixteenth century. Many of the
abuses, for example, the sale of indulgences, had been attacked by the entire
consensus of medieval Europe, from the great scholastics to Chaucer and
Langland.

The intransigent policies
of Cardinal Pole, Marys archbishop and cousin, bear comparison with the Papal
suppression of the Jesuit Mission in China two centuries later. There was a
brief chance to make the Catholic Church truly catholic without sacrificing
doctrine to the more intransigent Lutherans and Calvinists. Under the driving
intolerance of Mary, Philip, and Cardinal Pole, and with occasional gentle,
ineffectual demurrers from Rome, the universal church in England was turned into
a sect and so remained. It is necessary to understand this to appreciate more
the psychology than the doctrines of the Anglo-Catholic divines under Elizabeth,
James and the two Charleses, who built up a philosophy of the English Church as
a via media, a bridge church between Rome, Orthodoxy and
Protestantism, a branch of the Church Universal  which, ironically sheltered
under the royal supremacy, they hoped, would someday restore true universality
to Christendom.

Throughout the sixteenth
century all Western European churches were becoming national churches, whether
Protestant or Papal in their allegiance. The Spanish Church was and remained
until Vatican II essentially a national church, less markedly so than the
English but more than the Gallican French church, for the simple reason that
over vast periods of time the Spanish throne alone or in combination with that
of the Holy Roman Empire controlled the Papacy, not the other way around.
Ironically only Calvin in Geneva kept alive the idea of a theocratically ruled
divine society which had been at least the putative vision of Hildebrand.

Similar processes of
course had gone on in the Eastern churches. Northern Orthodoxy was nationalist
 Serbian, Russian, Bulgarian, etc.  while nationalist and ethnic tendencies
in the South had produced schismatic churches  Monophysite, Monothelite,
Nestorian  in Syria, Egypt and the Orient, all denying, incidentally, the
Orthodox charges of heresy against themselves  denials that were later to be
accepted by the Roman See in some instances, by Canterbury in others in
admitting various Uniat Churches to communion.

Hooker, Laud, Hall,
Andrewes, Cosin, Bramhall, Bull, Stillingfleet, Shillingworth, Pearson, Morton
were amongst the most learned theologians of their day. Parallel with their
theology was reborn in the English Church its characteristic piety  John
Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, Herbert, Nicholas Ferrar, Jeremy Taylor, Thomas
Traherne, Henry Vaughan, as well as Andrewes and Laud, were all devotional
writers of a type more meaningful to us today than most of the contemporary
Counter-Reformation mystics on the continent. They are only the more articulate
few out of many. It is the capacity of the English Church to produce so rich and
deep and manifold a life of prayer which nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Anglo-Catholics considered the principal sign of her catholicity, because it
reflected the continuity of her sacramental life.

The theologians
constructed an apologetic for a reformed Catholicism, protestant only against
what they considered specific Roman abuses and claims. Baptismal regeneration,
confirmation, the Real Presence as distinguished from trans-substantiation, the
Eucharistic sacrifice, the reservation of the Eucharist, auricular confession,
unction, invocation of the saints and the Blessed Virgin  all can be found in
the Caroline divines.

This entire theological
edifice was constructed not by appeal to recent Roman Catholic theology or the
medieval doctors but was based solidly on Scripture, the apostolic Fathers, the
patristic period, to and including St. Augustine, and the Councils of the
undivided church. In every instance the emphasis is on the apostolic life.
Christianity is envisaged as the pattern of life shown forth by those persons
who had been in intimate contact with the incarnate Lord, who had walked and
talked and eaten and drunk with the living Jesus. The Church is thought of as
itself a sacrament, social, but embodied like the Eucharist, of the Christ-life.

The brief interlude of
James II only consolidated the Anglo-Catholic tendency amongst bishops, priests
and laity. Archbishop Sancroft and six bishops remonstrated against the
liberties granted Dissenters and Roman Catholics, were brought to trial and
acquitted. This crisis was used by essentially irreligious forces to overthrow
James and deliver the crown to William of Orange, husband of Jamess sister. He
was one of the wealthiest men in Europe, the leader of an essentially economic
revolution. Once again, Sancroft and eight bishops refused the oaths to William
and Mary. They considered that even though he was a Roman Catholic, their oaths
to James were personal and so still binding. The archbishop, five bishops, and
four hundred clergy were deprived and were followed by a large but unknown
number of laymen. From then on the throne was no longer in fact head of an
Anglican church, but a Protestant, continental power over against it. Certain of
the bishops consecrated others and the most irreconcilable of the Catholic party
went into schism  the so-called Nonjurors  which lasted as an effective body
all through the eighteenth century. Towards the end of the century there were
some 50 congregations in London!

Most of the Episcopal
Church of Scotland refused the oaths. That Church as such became and has
remained disestablished. (William established the Presbyterian Church in
Scotland.) The Scottish Prayer Book and the English Nonjuring liturgy returned
to the first Prayer Book of Edward the Sixth, with considerable improvements in
the Catholic sense taken mostly from eastern liturgies. These included the
epiclesis or invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the elements of bread and wine,
lacking which the Roman rite is considered defective by the Orthodox.
Incidentally, the Book of Common Prayer of the American Episcopal Church and
American Orders are derived from the Scottish Church and the Nonjurors, not from
the English Church.

The Nonjuror schism is
extremely important in the background of the Oxford Movement. Bishop Ken and the
great eighteenth-century mystic, William Law, profoundly influenced Pusey, Keble
and Newman. The later generation of Young Turks around Newman  Ward, Oakley,
Pattison, the Romanizers  were specifically in revolt against the old
Anglo-Catholic tradition, quite as much as against the Evangelical and Broad
parties.

As the years went by, and
its distance from the Church widened, the little schism of the Nonjurors came,
in the polemical writings of its apologists, to be more and more sacramentally
oriented. The Apostolic Succession was looked on as a succession of the
sacraments, the episcopacy an enduring channel of the divine life blood. It was
the sacraments with their all-pervading gift of grace which bound the Church
together with an authority far surpassing Pope or king. Isolated as they were
from their parent body and totally unknown to the Church as a whole, the
Nonjurors emphasized the purely transcendental and mystical universality or
catholicity of the Church. It was for this reason that the Alexandrine and
Cappadocian Fathers, but especially the Syrians, appealed so greatly to them.
There had been plenty of exterior authority of all sorts in the Roman Empire in
the East. The Church was still loosely knit, with long and easily broken lines
of communication. The appeal against imperium to charisma was to limited
supernatural communities, the congregations of faithful whose power preceded
others because it operated on a higher plane.

It would be difficult to
overestimate the importance of William Law. The household of William Law was a
direct descendant of Little Gidding, the household of Nicholas Ferrar, as both
were of the household of St. Thomas More. The principal difference is the
increasing strictness forced by the effort to distinguish a devotional community
from a world in which prayer, meditation, contemplation and asceticism were at
ever increasing discount.

William Law is only the
most famous of the Nonjuring divines, due probably to the cogency of his
literary style and the conscious attempt to avoid sectarianism in his writings.
He was a late-arrived Nonjuror who refused the oaths to George I. In spite of
the strictness of his own life, his controversial writings against deism,
against the egoistic morality of Mandevilles Fable of the Bees, against
Protestantism, against Roman Catholicism are for their time singularly liberal
in tone and echo the judiciousness of Richard Hooker. It was on Laws
controversial writings and some of the more orthodox ruminations of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge that in the next century F.D. Maurice was able for his own
purposes to erect a bridge back to the main Anglo-Catholic tradition of the
seventeenth century.

It is Laws A Serious
Call to a Devout and Holy Life by which he is known in the history of
English literature and by which he profoundly affected the course of religious
development in England. It was a seminal book for the Evangelical Movement, a
turning point in the spiritual life of the Wesleys, but it also deeply
influenced, in their notions of a dedicated life, people as unlike as Samuel
Johnson and Edward Gibbon. It is a devotional manual of the type popular in
Catholic circles on the continent in the eighteenth century and amongst the
Quakers and other Pietists in England and the Germanic countries. Today its
asceticism seems impossibly strict for anyone living in the world unsupported by
a monastic regimen. Yet it is a direct descendant of the works of the medieval
English mystics who were anchorites, hermits or even housewives but almost never
conventuals.

Law was more learned in
the mystical tradition than most English pietists, and so his book describes a
more systematic cultivation of the interior life than any other English work of
his time. Then, too, his influence was much greater because more public, and not
so closely confined to the audience of a sect, due to the great literary merit
of A Serious Call. It is still read by thousands of people of different
religions, or none. In his fifties, after a life of occasional curacies and many
years in the home of Edward Gibbons father, where he lived first as a tutor,
and then as a kind of chaplain and spiritual counselor to uncounted people of
all parties in the Church, or none, who came to consult him, he retired to a
cottage in the country at Kings Cliffe, his birthplace, and established a kind
of little convent with two ladies, Mrs. Hutcheson and Hester Gibbon, the aunt of
the historian. Until his death twenty-one years later, the three devoted
themselves to a strict religious life of prayer, contemplation, teaching in two
schools for poor boys and girls, and charity, the latter so undemanding as to
seriously disturb the neighboring rector.

It is in this later
period that Law wrote the bulk of his mystical works and published his beautiful
edition of the works of Jakob Boehme. With his hierarchic cosmogony and his
dynamic vision of the supernatural world and the souls place in it, Boehme
verges on Gnosticism. Although he takes over much of Boehmes mythology, Law is
in fact less gnostic than the pseudo-Dionysus or Scotus Erigena. The total
impression given by his visionary writings is his close kinship with St.
Bonaventura and the long tradition of By Light, Light  going back to
Philo, Christian Neo-Platonism, and the Merkabah mysticism of Judaism and its
later descendants in the Kabbalah and Hasidism. What Law does is to adjust the
ancient Gnostic emanationist melodrama to the interior life as a set of symbols
of the progress of the soul, what in our day Martin Buber or even Carl Jung have
done. This is not the highest level of mystical experience, but it is a most
effective propaedeutic, and when it is adjusted to Catholic Christianity and to
life modeled on the historic Jesus, a most captivating one.

Laws influence on
Evangelicalism and on the revival of Anglo-Catholicism would be hard to
overemphasize. It is more than a taste in reading matter in the Fathers of the
Church. It is even more than a witness to the special lay monasticism so
specially English. It is above all else an apocalyptic vision of the Church as
the body of Christ, the manifestation of the Creative Word, and itself a great
Sacrament whose body and blood is concentrated and communicated at the altar.
Law spoke from Patmos. To him the Trinitarian process, the Incarnation and
Atonement were of the substance of which the great cosmogonies of the pagan
Orient had been but dim rememberings. Although no one would know of them for two
hundred years, Laws direct visionary experience, rising from his meditation on
Boehme and on the Fathers, was a kind of redemption of the Memphite Theology,
the earliest tractate of Egyptian religion, and of the cosmological dramas of
Mesopotamia and Syria. Viewed from the vantage point of William Law the endless
polemic of Frasers The Golden Bough falls quietly into place as prophecy
not only of the Christian myth but of the Christian life.

It is relatively easy for
us, sophisticated with all the writings of comparative religion of two
centuries, to absorb Laws transmuted Boehmenism. What it gave to Pusey, Keble
and Newman could have been little else than the mood, the tone arising from a
kind of physiological conviction that they lived in the tissue of the Living
Body.

Laws contribution to the
more systematic apologetic of later Anglo-Catholicism was of more considerable
importance, although the influence was seminal rather than at large. He
established the appeal to experience, what today we would call existentialism,
as the effective answer to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and from him
stems all the anti-rationalistic polemic of Coleridge, Newman, Butler, down to
the Modernists. As, in a sense, a corollary of this appeal to experience, his
doctrine of the Atonement follows naturally. He demolishes the forensic theory,
that the sacrifice at the cross was a debt to be paid to the bookkeeping of
heaven, with a direct appeal to the experience of at-one-ment, the divinization
of human nature by its lifting up into the Incarnation. This appeal is as
ancient as the early Fathers and is reiterated again and again in the
semi-Platonic mysticism of English Franciscan philosophy and poetry 

Honde by honde then
schulle us take
Ant joye & bliss schulle
us make
For the devil of Hell man
hagt forsake
And Christe our lauerd is
makit our make.

This is a theological
tradition which would come to flower in the combination of Bishop Charles Gores
theory of kenosis and the generally prevailing Anglican doctrine of the
incarnation and atonement which begins to gather force with G. Mauberly, then
L.S. Thornton, Coleridge, F.D. Maurice, Frank Weston, the Bishop of Zanzibar. In
later years the mystical, semi-gnostic notion of the equivalence of macrocosm
and microcosm would be forgotten, but in Law it is the essential explanation of
the experienced fact  The divine drama is in you. And last of all, Law
reestablished a specific kind of devotion still characteristic of Anglican
piety. A Serious Call has often been compared to St. Francis de Saless
Introduction to the Devout Life. It is most interesting to read them
together, supplemented with Laws final devotional works  The Spirit of
Prayer, The Way to Divine Knowledge and The Spirit of Love. They led
one of his editors, the Quaker S. Hobhouse, to claim him as a Quaker. It would
be just as easy for someone saturated in St. Thomas More and the late medieval
English mystics to claim him as a Roman Catholic, more traditional by far than
the rococo devotional manuals of his time.

Much could be written
about the saintly Nonjuring Bishop of Bath and Wells, Thomas Ken. His devotional
writings would best be read in the idyllic setting of the cathedral he occupied
for so short a time, along Kens Walk, by grassy battlements and greenish
moats and swanny pools, with the splendid cathedral in the background. His hymns
are the most deeply devotional of their kind, poetry of great simplicity and
power, although the enormous bulk of verse, not hymns, which he left behind him
in manuscript is seldom poetry at all. It is tragic that so gifted a bone
pastor should only have held his see for three years, and significant that
he is still the legend of the place. But the most significant thing about him is
that he is the only man in the history of theology ever to write an explication
of the catechism, titled, and most deservedly, The Practice of Divine Love.
Ken is a divine far better quoted than discussed.

When the love of God is
produced in my heart, and is set on work, my last concern is to preserve and
ensure and quicken it; It is preserved by Prayer, the pattern of which is the
Lords Prayer; It is ensured to us by the Sacraments, which are the Pledges of
love; and more particularly it is quickened by the Holy Eucharist, which is the
feast of Love; So that the plain order of the Cathechism teaches me the rise,
the progress, and the perfection of Divine Love, which God of his great mercy
give me grace to follow.

I would not, O Jesu,
desire life everlasting, but that I may there everlasting love thee.

O inexhaustible love, do
thou eternally breathe love into me, that my love to thee may be eternally
increasing and tending towards infinity, since a love less than infinite is not
worthy of thee.

* *

Lord, what I need I
labour in vain, to search out the manner of thy mysterious presence in the
Sacrament, when my Love assures me thou art there? All the faithful who approach
thee with prepared hearts, they will know thou art there, they feel the Virtue
of Divine Love going out of thee, to heal their infirmities and to inflame their
affections, for which all Love, all Glory be to thee.

O merciful Jesus, let
that immortal food which in the Holy Eucharist thou vouchsafest me, instil into
my weak and languishing Soul, new supplies of Grace, new life, new Love, new
Vigour, and new Resolution, that I may never more faint, or droop or tire in my
duty.

To God the Father, who
first loved us, and made us accepted in the Beloved; to God the Son who loved
us, and washed us from our Sins in his own Blood; to God the Holy Ghost, who
sheds the Love of God abroad in our hearts, be all Love and all Glory for time,
and for eternity. Amen.

from The Practice of
Divine Love

* *

Forty-five years old,
just before the swift decline of his powers, Coleridge was to write in
Biographia Literaria:

The feeling of gratitude,
which I cherish towards these men [George Fox, Jacob Behmen, and William Law]
has caused me to digress further than I had forseen or proposed; but to have
passed them over in an historical sketch of my literary life and opinions, would
have seemed to me like the denial of a debt, the concealment of a boon. For the
writings of these mystics acted in no slight degree to prevent my mind from
being imprisoned within the outline of any single dogmatic system. They
contributed to keep alive the heart in the head; gave me an
indistinct, yet stirring and working presentment, that all the products of the
mere reflective faculty partook of DEATH, and were as the rattling twigs and
sprays in winter, into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to
which I had not penetrated, if they were to afford my soul either food or
shelter.

Coleridge was certainly
the most influential  what shall we call him  certainly not theologian, but
rather, theological speculator  of the early years of the nineteenth century,
but it is difficult to isolate any stable and consistent ideas, much less a
system from his work. His literary remains are an immense mass of notes. Like
Kubla Khan, they begin in dream, emerge into reality, and are interrupted by
the unwelcome appearance of persons from Porlock before they have become
completely realized.

His opinions evolve
steadily from deism or Unitarianism to an acceptance of what he claimed was
Anglican orthodoxy, but all along the way and in the final summation he is never
worried if he contradicts himself  like Whitman: Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself. But, like Whitman, there certainly can be
no question but that Coleridge was a man with a system, but a physiological
system, a temperament, a tone, a way of coping with life and its problems. And
there is no question but that he is often very muddled reading. His opponents
have called him muddied, and have put down the confusion of his thought to
the effects of a lifelong opium habit. The major Broad Church theologians of the
nineteenth century looked back to him as an ancestor, practically a founder, and
his influence on the greatest of them, F.D. Maurice, was very strong.

However, it is only an
accident of history, of politics, the extreme Fundamentalism, in the modern
sense of the word, of the Oxford Movement, that prevents him from being
acknowledged equally as an ancestor of latter-day Anglo-Catholicism. After the
defection of Newman and the Romanizers  Ward, Oakley, Manning, and the
rest  from the Oxford Movement, it was F.D. Maurice, the Coleridgean, and the
Cambridge group under his influence, along with Pusey and Keble, who provided
the synthesis, such as it was, that guided the intransigent so-called ritualists
in their slum parishes in the last half of the century.

The point-to-point
visibility in Coleridges speculations may be low, but it is possible to
triangulate the whole field of his thought from the few clear, outstanding
summits achieved in his maturity.

What Coleridge
accomplished was a qualitative change. His inchoate speculations are
incomparably more profound than the rationalistic, scholastic, or sentimental
theology of the eighteenth century. He was also infinitely better read in the
philosophy and theology and literatures of several languages. He was a voice of
the revolution in sensibility paralleled abroad by persons as widely separated
as Baudelaire and Hegel  both of whom he resembles. Like Blake, Baudelaire,
Hölderlin, Stendhal, Coleridge is talking about what we talk about, or at least
did until it became apparent in the middle years of the twentieth century that
Western civilization was not sick, but had ceased to be alive.

He brought Anglican
theology up to date and out into a wider world. Few clergy indeed in his time
were familiar with the German language, much less German philosophy and
theology, and probably none with the significant literature of the continent.
Few, strange as it may seem, read the Cambridge Platonists, Cudworth, Henry
More, Whichcote, John Smith, and the rest, the most significant counter-movement
to English empiricism and rationalism. This possibly was due to the sheer
badness of writing of both German and English idealists. The combination of
their two turgidities goes far to account for the opacity and disorder of
Coleridges own prose. Biographia Literaria, Aids to Reflection, The Friend,
Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit, and On the Constitution of the Church
and State must be read in a context that includes Baudelaires notebooks and
even the decadent diary writers, Amiel, Bashkirtsiev and Barbellion.

Coleridge was penetrating
the world of romantic alienation finally defined by Rimbaud and Proust. The
argot of technical divinity conceals this from himself. Unfortunately he could
no longer transmute the quest for illumination into poetry. The poems of his
latter years only say badly what is already formless enough in his prose, but
they lead straight to Baudelaires La Cloche Fêlée, the first major
poem of spiritual alienation.

Coleridge tirelessly and
passionately attacked the eighteenth-century inventors of evidences and proofs
for God or Scripture, always with the appeal to the unalloyed experience of
faith, the confrontation of the contingent I Am with the absolute It Is. He was
quite right to characterize this as purified Lutheranism.

He took over from the
Cambridge Platonists and Kant the distinction between two kinds of knowing,
which he called reason and understanding. Today we would probably reverse the
meanings of these two words as Coleridge uses them. This is an unfortunate habit
of Coleridges; his distinction of act and potency suffers from the same fault.
However his reason is not emotional intuition. He carefully distinguishes
the whole man, acting in comprehension, from the anti-intellectualism of the
bigot, the emotionalism of the enthusiast, or the rationalistic, religious
apologetic of the orthodox  especially as the latter was represented in the
external, mechanical rationalism of Paley, famous for his watch and watchmaker
proof, the argument from design. God, Coleridge pointed out, is not a
watchmaker deduced from a watch found in the road, but an experience far more
veridical than the watch itself, an experience which blasted away the sensate
prudence of the British man in the street to whom Paley appealed. Until the
banality of Paley had been banished from the theological universe of discourse,
there could be no room for the supernaturalism of the Oxford Movement, not even
for the conventional piety of Keble, much less for the sophisticated skepticism
of Newman.

Coleridge dismissed the
epistemological dilemma which still bedevils British empiricism by simply
denying the initial assumption of Locke  Nihil est in intellectu sed quod
fuerit in sensu  with the quip of Leibnizs Praeter ipsum
intellectum. The orthodox had been accepting the terms of the deists;
Coleridge denied them altogether and moved the dispute to another court. This is
his primary importance. English philosophy had continued to attack Humes
skepticism from positions Hume had demolished. Kant and Coleridge after him (and
more confusedly the Cambridge Platonists) accepted Humes attack on rationalism
and empiricism, and began over again with Humes skepticism as the foundation
for a new definition of a different kind of reason.

Justification, whether by
faith or the sacraments, had not been a pressing issue for generations. After
violent controversy, the Establishment had come to rest content in the
contradictory XI and XXVII Articles of Religion, Wherefore, that we are
justified by Faith only, is a most wholesome Doctrine and very full of
comfort. Baptism is . . . a sign of Regeneration or New Birth. And the
Baptism of young children is retained. The Protestants took one article, the
High Church the other, and rested content.

In Aids to Reflection
Coleridge put justification by faith in the center of his subjectively validated
religion. God is known as the beginning of thought, by an integral response, not
by ratiocination or the association of experiences. This response is a moral
assent, the assumption of responsibility of the absolute by the contingent 
Faith, which justifies and saves prior to any good works, or any works at all.
The epistemological process is moral, and begins directly with God. This is
philosophical Methodism, without the emotional crisis of Wesleyan
conversion, without the enthusiasm of the Methodist and Evangelical
revivals, and of course without merit. So it is not surprising that
Coleridge can find no place for the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist
except in sentiment, as symbols of Church Order and tradition, and very little
place for the Incarnation of the actual historic Jesus.

This judgment may be
unfair to Coleridge. His great magnum opus was to include a large section on
Baptism, the Eucharist and the historic Jesus, the notes for which were either
never written or have not survived. All of his notes are now being published by
the Bollingen Foundation, and Coleridge, already complicated enough, turns out
to be even more complex and difficult. But his theological influence can only be
discussed in terms of what was available then in his published writings. Still
he says, I hope to be saved, not by my faith in Christ, but by the faith of
Christ in me.

Kants pure speculative
reason becomes Coleridges the Higher Reason, operative in the noumenal
realm, its object the self. The subject becomes its own object. As Coleridge
says in The Friend, Thus God, the soul, eternal truth, etc., are the
objects of reason: but they are themselves reason. The Theoretic Reason
mediates noumenal (Higher Reason) and phenomenal knowledge (understanding) and
validates the latter with the former. With this modified dualism Coleridge
escapes from the rigorous monism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at
least to his own satisfaction. Since the Higher Reason operates in the world of
self, God, freedom, immortality, the realm of morals, it is the true instrument
of the Will and the Will is cut off from the phenomenal world. So the Higher
Reason becomes faith.

Initially this would
establish a system of double truth, but powerful conceptual entities like these
 Will and Higher Reason  tend to devour all around them. Coleridge drifts
towards the will mysticism of the late nineteenth century. As If creates
Is. This is the metaphysic of radical pragmatism, and lies behind most
theological speculation, except Neo-Thomism, from then on. The enemy will say,
The head has surrendered unconditionally to the heart. Coleridge shies away
from the ultimate consequences embraced by some of his successors, in favor of
the existential confrontation of total experience, but the practical consequence
endures. The Higher Reason is an eye opening on the immediate vision of God of
the mystics and that eye is opened by the will.

A hundred years would
pass before it became common again to say, Since the statements about the
noumenal order have no phenomenological basis, they are pseudo-statements.
Coleridges descendants can only retort, The same to you and many of them.
In Coleridge are foreshadowed most of the post-Kantian disputes.

If faith is not
objectively negotiable but dependent on each man alone, the direct communion of
the faithful on earth is dissolved in transcendent individual communication
coming only through God. The Incarnation, and still more, the sacraments become
unreal, and there is only the conversation of omnipotence and contingency. This
is the road out of Coleridge or Kant taken by Kierkegaard and the neo-Lutherans,
Barth and his followers. Newman, action Catholicism, the neo-Catholics and the
Catholic Modernists took another.

In practice Coleridge
simply emotionalized the reason and gave it over to the rule of the will
confronted with the life of faith. TRY IT, says Coleridge. This is precisely
the grammar of assent. The will after all is stimulated by the
phenomenological world. Does Coleridge choose one of these alternatives
consistently? No. But no philosophical system can be closed in perfect
consistency. Gödels Proof applies to metaphysics as well as mathematics.
Coleridge clings to the Church.

Coleridge shifts his
ground completely to say that proofs in the noumenal realm of the Higher Reason
are only reflections of processes which hold for the understanding in the
phenomenal realm and cannot be logically final  only convincing  by a leap
 of the will. The rationality of the universe, the order of nature, the law of
contradiction, the unity of thought and being, are only plausible revelations,
like the ontological proof of the existence of God, or the specific revelations
of Scriptures and Church. This way lies a Humean, if not a simply skeptical,
Catholicism. It is permissible to believe anything that works, can be plausibly
proved, cannot be disproved, and satisfies the will via the emotions. All that
is necessary is to purge Christianity of errors of fact and disprovable notions,
and move religion bodily into the realm of its own transcendental consistency.
Faith sees all being with the anagogic eye.

This is etherialization,
the climax of the movement from tribal cult to world religion. It had already
happened on a minor scale at the critical point when Christianity moved out into
the wide world of Classical civilization. Origen and St. Clement, although
always saving the literal meanings, did the same thing by treating Scripture as
an inexhaustible system of metaphors. After Coleridge, the main task of theology
becomes, in one guise or another, etherialization, or, as Marx and Engels would
call it, the transformation of quantity into quality.

Since an etherialized
system cannot violate the mundane understanding, it becomes easier to believe
mysteries and impossibilities  that the infant Jesus came through the
maidenhead of his mother like light through glass  than to believe in the
troubled factual narrative of the latest Gospel synthesis. So Lord Acton could
say, I have never been troubled by an intellectual doubt, to the confusion
of simple minds ever since. The only rule is Entia non sunt multiplicanda
praeter necessitatum  a matter of taste  not certainly of the logic of
the understanding, because nature too obviously multiplies entities beyond
necessity.

Coleridge introduces into
the indeterminacy he had created a determinant which is in fact esthetic and
socially conditioned  the law of
conscience which peremptorily commands belief. Following on this, the voice of
God calling in the garden, and the Will responding, come all the religious
emotions, the loneliness of the soul in the abyss of contingency and the welcome
comfort of the accepted Fatherhood of God. TRY IT, says Coleridge,
Christianity is not a theory or a speculation  not a philosophy of life, but
a life, and a living process  TRY IT. The facts of Christianity are not
invented by imagination, but they are transmuted by it from a lower to a higher
form.

Coleridges speculations
about the Trinitarian process follow naturally from his will philosophy, and
lead to a triadic dynamism much like that attributed to the Hegelian dialectic.
Like most theogonies, Coleridges is really a disguised psychology, a projection
of the processes of the self. This may be interesting reading, but its influence
was minimal and much of it has not been published until today.

Many critics have made a
great deal of Coleridges theories of the relations of Church and State. They
are unreal because they are posited on the assumption of a Christian society
which had ceased to exist in his day, and has vanished in ours. He thought of
the Church as two churches, an Establishment of the clerisy, the
responsables, the liberal professions and arts, and the administrators of
policy, and this body intertwined between, and nourishing and being nourished
by, the purely secular power and the Church of the spirit. This is Platos
Republic as worked out by Thomas Arnold and the nineteenth-century British
Public School mystique. No doubt many members of the British Establishment still
exist who think of society in these terms, but alas, it is, and probably always
was, a hoax, the institutional form of the Social Lie. It assumes what does not
exist, a Christian society. Via F.D. Maurice, William Morris, Ruskin, and the
like, Coleridge might be called the originator of Christian Socialism, Guild
Socialism, and other more benign theories of a sanctified, corporative state.
This is a beautiful dream and something like it doubtless would have come to be,
if the Catholic Church had won the world. Today, as the Church faces apocalypse
and an underground life, it is an irrelevant pattern for the Christian
community, although medievalists of the older generation may well think it by
far the most Catholic of all Coleridges ideas.

Coleridge taught
apologetics how to talk to the alienated clerisy  the clerkly class
dispossessed and prostituted by a predatory society. Newman summed up
Coleridges qualitative change of venue for all English theology after him:

And while history in
prose and verse was thus made the instrument of Church feelings and opinions [by
Scott], a philosophical basis for the same was under formation in England by a
very original thinker [Coleridge], who, while he indulged a liberty of
speculation which no Christian can tolerate, and advanced conclusions which were
often heathen rather than Christian, yet after all instilled a higher philosophy
into inquiring minds, than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept.

The Prospects of
the Anglican Church

II. FROM THE OXFORD
MOVEMENT TO LUX MUNDI

History seems to occur
according to the theories of the philosophers of history who are contemporary
with its facts. Certainly the early years of the nineteenth century were very
Hegelian times. Again and again social forces and organized movements were
pushed to critical points where they turned into their opposites, or where
quantity turned into quality. This was especially true of the Little
Counter-Reformation that accompanied the Holy Alliances restoration after the
fall of Napoleon. In the case of Lamennais the whole process was embodied in the
life of one man, developed consistently and in a straight line. In England
things moved slower. Development depended on the resolution of conflicting
forces and the influence of antagonistic individuals. Furthermore, England, with
Austria and Russia, was the source of reaction, not as France, or the Rhineland,
or North Italy, the victim. But it was socially and economically a peculiar kind
of reaction. England was the most industrially advanced state in Europe, and the
ideologue, or at least rhetorician, of British reaction was completely a man of
the Enlightenment  Edmund Burke. Whatever his political maneuvers, he was the
voice of a secular society ruled by an oligarchy of aristocratic capitalists,
who were great entrepreneurs of the oncoming industrial civilization because, as
great landowners, they possessed almost unlimited resources for capital
investment. The economics of the Manchester School, the belief that the sum
total of private evils would result in the public good, was not only secular and
immoral; in practice it shattered the structure inherited from the old feudal
society and created one of hopelessly antagonistic classes tending towards
final, total atomization.

It is this irreparable
schism in society that produced, by immediate reflex, the schism in the soul of
what might be called the Romantic Left  Sade, Blake, Hölderlin, Stendhal,
Baudelaire, and not least, Lamennais. In England the secular society was larger
than on the Continent, more democratized; its material benefits seeped lower
down the hierarchy of castes and classes. Reflecting this consent of the
majority was the almost complete secularization of religion. By far the most
conspicuous things on the British landscape, urban or rural, were the steeples
of churches, and dotted amongst them were almost as many chapels of the
Dissenters. The architectural symbols of a homogeneous society have misled many
even to this day. England had ceased to be a Christian state.

Coleridge had envisaged a
reorganized England, once again socially dense, hierarchically structured, and
governed by a supernaturally sanctioned clerisy, a system which curiously enough
greatly resembled the Enlightenments notion of the Confucian polity of the
Chinese Empire with the addition of the mystery and ritual of a revamped
medievalism. This idea, a kind of metaphysical Radical Toryism, was never to die
out in England. Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris, Belloc, Chesterton,
Eric Gill, Herbert Read  it survives to this day and remains at the heart of
the vision of most Anglo-Catholicism.

That is not the way the
Oxford Movement, the mother of the Catholic revival, started out. It started as
reaction pure and simple, but reaction committed to an unassimilable principle
 the idea of a Christian society. The hysteria of the response of the Oxford
Reformers to the first moves of the secular state strikes us today as comic, a
tempest in a vicarage teapot, until we understand that behind bigotry and
old-fogeyism, these men were the survivors of a cohesive society which they
thought still existed around them. They were oblivious to the fact that society
was in the process of atomizing itself and that the process was irreversible and
would continue for a century. In such a context any theory of, any movement
towards a coherent, cohesive social order was bound to be revolutionary if
pushed to conclusion. They did not know this. They thought they were
conservatives, counterrevolutionaries, reactionaries.

In 1832 the Established
Church in England, long incompatible with the secularizing society, had become
in detail intolerable. In 1833 there appeared anonymously the extraordinary
Black Book, an exposé of abuses of the state church almost incredible to us
today. Many bishoprics, cathedral chapters and certain great churches were
immensely wealthy and disposed of thousands of livings and benefices with income
sufficient to move their recipients immediately into the lower echelon of the
upper classes. The aristocracy, even the landed gentry and many old feudal
corporations disposed of other livings  perhaps the majority  which ranged
in income from a modest competence to modest wealth. Evelyn Waugh once pointed
out that the standard of living of a successful Hollywood movie star or director
did not differ greatly from that of an early nineteenth-century country rector
with a well-endowed living  the differences were alcohol, sexual promiscuity
and a swimming pool. These livings were awarded, except in rare instances, with
little or no regard to learning or religion, commonly to the younger sons of the
aristocracy.

In most of the wealthiest
benefices and in almost half of all the others the vicar or the rector was not
resident. The duties of his pastoral care were discharged by curates, seldom
more learned or religious than their employers, who were paid a poverty wage, a
hundred pounds a year or less. Such a minister was dependent upon his house, the
produce of a few acres, stole fees, and the gifts of his congregation to
keep his usually large family above the level of destitution. The Russian Church
in 1830 might seem to us to be very exotic and very barbarous. Economically the
situation of the pastors was much the same, just a different flavor of
ignorance, superstition, semi-literacy, Erastianism, and lack of sanitation.
Perhaps the Russian clergy preserved more vestiges of piety.

The picture drawn in the
Black Book has established itself in history, but it is overdrawn. Things
were like that, but they werent all like that. The Established Church had
preserved the idea and the form of a supernaturally sanctioned clerkly class, a
caste of responsables, devoted to learning, prayer, and the cure of
souls. Scattered all through the body of the English Church, like white blood
cells in the bloodstream of a very sick man, were dedicated men who spent their
lives living up to their priestly vocation, piously unaware that their
colleagues looked on them as fools, or at the best, fossils.

It was not the theology
of the Established Church or its pastoral relations, however defective or
nonexistent in many instances these were, but its structure, which was
intolerable to a society entering the era of free competition and capital
accumulation. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Irish Anglican Church,
where the old bishoprics were supported by the full power of the state and the
enforced tribute of the entire population, Roman Catholic or Presbyterian. In
the early summer of 1833 Parliament moved to suppress ten of the most redundant
of the Irish Anglican bishoprics. And on July 14 John Keble of Oriel College
preached a sermon on the national apostasy  the church in mortal danger. For
the rest of his life John Henry Newman was to say that this sermon marked the
beginning of the Oxford Movement. Reading it today it seems to us hysterical and
hypocritical rant, yet John Keble was a gentle soul and far from being a
hysteric or a ranter. The secular state had moved to remedy a terrible injustice
 at considerable profit to itself. The parliamentary agitation for reform of
the Established Church was motivated by sentiments of profitable equity and
respect for the religious liberties of Protestants, Roman Catholics, Jews and
nonreligious people, whose numbers already were approaching a majority even in
England  if we include the bulk of the population who were really indifferent
and who conformed to the Church only rarely for convenience. Parliament was
beginning, in practice and with maximum pious hypocrisy, to recognize that Great
Britain was not really a Christian nation, much less an episcopal one, and that
the Church as the spiritual executive arm of the society had lost its monopoly
of power. Keble ignored all this. He attacked Parliament, and the organs of the
state, and behind them the consenting population, on moral grounds. There was no
hint that the Establishment itself was, by its very nature, profoundly immoral.
For Keble it was the other way around. The indifferentism and infidelity and
even mockery with which the unsanctified viewed the Established Church was due
to their own evil; in fact to their allegiance to a personal devil.

The Church is a
supernatural institution whose officers are the direct descendants of the
Apostles; their authority is guaranteed and made holy by sacrament, by the
direct physical action of the Holy Spirit descending, by physical imposition of
hands, from the flame of Pentecost. England is a Christian nation, absolutely
bound in all matters spiritual, and in many temporal, to love, honor and obey
the voice of the Third Person of the Trinity speaking through the Living
Apostles  amongst whom of course are the Irish Bishops.

Hildebrand could not have
been more forthright  as a matter of fact, he was less so, and he spoke from
more substantial grounds. It is easy to see why Newman felt the national
apostasy sermon launched the Oxford Movement. Behind the pious rhetoric it is
all there. Society cannot escape its Christian nature, except into conscious
sin. Spiritual authority is supernatural, hierarchic, and in its own realm,
absolute. The Church is the guardian and purveyor of embodied grace, of the
sacraments which place the Christian in direct communication with God. Outside
this sanctified body there can be no salvation.

The function of the state
in all its organs  the British state in 1833  is to enforce the communion of
the citizens in this supernatural body. Anything outside it is simply sin.
Authority is finally vested in the living representatives of the Apostles and
that authority in any final confrontation overrides any other authority
whatever.

Here are all the claims
and contradictions of the Oxford Movement. Its primary fallacious assumption
that nations in the nineteenth century were still Christian; its oblivious
blindness to the world of ordinary affairs around it  Keble spoke with the
unworldly isolation of a medieval anchorite  its glorification of what after
all is only an administrative structure  episcopacy  to the point where not
Baptism or the Lords Supper but Holy Orders, the apostolic succession, becomes
the principal sacrament, and last, but not least, what seems to us its
unfortunate tone of hysterical self-righteousness.

It is easy for us to
think of the Oxford Reformers as bad men. They were not. They were simply
innocent, sealed away from the social and religious realities of the world
around them by the peculiar monastic life of the Oxford colleges of their day.
They were no more priggish or bigoted than the other Christians of their time.
As their movement grew, they certainly demonstrated that truly religious values
were still matters of life and death importance to vast numbers of Englishmen.
The unreality of the world which they constructed for themselves was eventually
to prove their salvation. Confronted with the facts of life, the Oxford
Counter-Reformation would turn into its opposite. Beginning as the most intense
reaction, it would eventually become the most active and comprehensive and
enduring movement of Catholic liberalism.

The story of the Movement
has been told innumerable times. It is a historical romance played out on a
limited stage and full of the most intense drama. To judge from the immense
number of successful books still being published, it fascinates thousands of
people who have no interest whatever in religious questions. I have no desire to
retell the story but it would be to the point to summarize the characters and
careers of the leaders of the Oxford Movement and define the relation of each to
the growth of a New Catholicism.

Even in the heyday of
Newmans leadership, and certainly after he left, adherents of the Movement were
known not as Newmanites but as Puseyites. Dr. Edward Bouverie Pusey, Regius
Professor of Hebrew, was the only professional theologian of the group and one
of the few who came to the movement from a High Church, rather than Evangelical,
background. He was also the only one familiar with contemporary European
theology. In fact he had deliberately gone to Germany to study infidelity at
its sources for the purpose of combating it. He was also the only leader of the
Movement whose family were wealthy aristocrats.

Pusey spent only four and
twelve months studying in Germany altogether, but that was sufficient to make
him far more of a scholar in Biblical criticism and patristics than anybody else
in England. He gave bottom to the movement, for his contributions were nothing
if not weighty. His first contribution to the famous Tracts for the Times
was the thirty-fifth, on Baptism, a tract of over three hundred pages,
inexpressibly dreary reading today. Pusey has been shut out from posterity by
his prose style. Even his most controversial sermons are unbearably dull and his
own translations of the Fathers of the Church make those passionate men so
boring that today we can read them only by the most powerful exertion of the
will, no mean accomplishment in the translation of Augustine, Clement, or
Origen, masters of classical rhetoric. Nevertheless it was Puseys concentration
on Scripture, on the Fathers and on the Apostles that gave the Movement a
content that could be passed on to the next generation of Anglican Catholic
reformers.

He inaugurated
comprehensive projects of translation of the Fathers and republication of the
great English divines which would take final form in the many volumes of the
Library of the Fathers, the Ante-Nicene Christian Library, the
Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, and the Library of
Anglo-Catholic Theology. Although schoolboys in England were caned if they
could not write bad Greek and Latin verses, there is little evidence that the
English clergy read extensively in the Fathers and Doctors of the Church in the
original tongues, but the huge sets inspired by Dr. Pusey can be found in most
large secondhand bookshops in the English-speaking world to this day, and give
evidence of once having been thoroughly read.

It is impossible to
overestimate the importance of this availability of the past. Puseys sermons
may be uninspiring, even Newmans may sometimes depend on a bygone religious
sensibility, and a bygone taste in style, but it is impossible to read the
powerful minds that put together a Church, a communion, a polity and a
philosophy that would survive both the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and
the establishment of the Church by Constantine without being deeply moved. The
Oxford Reformers themselves never spoke of themselves as Puseyites, or
Newmanites, or Anglo-Catholics (least of all High Churchmen, which they most
certainly were not) but as Apostolics, and their appeal was to the Apostolic
life, and the life of the Church of the Fathers, when the Church was very far
from being an establishment, but was a saving remnant in a dissolute and
dissolving society  a position in fact almost exactly like that, did they but
know it, of the Church of the faithful in the days of George IV and William IV
and of the horrors of what Marx called the period of the primitive accumulation
of capital.

Each of the Oxford
Reformers was an ancestor of a type of clergyman that would endure in the
Anglican Church until well into the twentieth century. Pusey was the only one
from an aristocratic family or one that remained wealthy  Newmans father went
bankrupt. This harsh, uningratiating man made the movement fashionable. Before
his wifes death he was in the process of becoming a society clergyman of the
common type. After her death he became convinced that God had punished him for
loving her more than Himself. Pusey turned into a disheveled fanatic, wore a
hair shirt and subjected himself to penances that embarrassed the conventional
and domestic Keble, who he insisted on making his confessor. This of course only
made him more fashionable.

About the time of
Newmans defection, the members of the movement reestablished auricular
confession as a general practice of their lay followers, and soon as a matter of
obligation. They had almost from the beginning gone to confession to one
another. Pusey became a fashionable confessor, although penitents had to seek
him out in his isolated parish.

It is usually said that
the obsession of the Oxford Reformers with the depravity of man was an
inheritance of their evangelical youth, but only Newman was raised as a typical
twice-born evangelical. Furthermore a glance at Roman Catholic, Lutheran, or
High Church manuals of devotion of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century reveals that conviction of utter sinfulness was no monopoly of the
followers of the Wesleys and Whitefield. For that matter, it is the constant
reference to the sinfulness of the congregation that distinguishes, over and
above the comparative triviality of liturgies, the language of the Book of
Common Prayer from that of the Roman or Orthodox Mass and breviary.

Pusey, Keble and Newman
all wrote devotional works. They all, but Puseys most of all, are top heavy
with guilt. Prayer, meditation, and contemplation show little progression.
Anyone who took them literally would find it almost impossible to get beyond the
logjam of his own sin and into the unruffled waters of contemplation. Yet none
of the leaders who, as far as the Ten Commandments were concerned, led
practically blameless lives, seem to have been aware of their own besetting
faults, spiritual pride, social irresponsibility, and willful ignorance. This
was precisely the kind of piety members of the English upper and middle classes
found most congenial in the days of the dark, satanic mills.

Pusey more than anyone
else was also responsible for a relentless emphasis on fundamentals of Catholic
doctrine and practice. He was anything but a Ritualist. For most of his life he
was content to celebrate the Eucharist in surplice and scarf, long after
chasubles, candles and incense had become common in the city parishes of the
Movement. Similarly he avoided the hundred flowers of post-Tridentine doctrine
and devotion which became popular after the middle of the century. He was
uninterested in the Sacred Heart or the Immaculate Conception. As Newman became
hypnotically fixed on the authority of the Papacy, it is obvious that Pusey
ceased to be able to understand him. Pusey was content with the Church of the
Fathers and the early Councils that he had constructed around himself and
surrounded by an impenetrable wall. Again this might be called pride and
ignorance, but it was also rigorous insistence on fundamentals. The basic flaw
in Puseys system was the terrific tension set up in its narrow prayer life, at
once intense and impoverished.

What did John Keble
contribute, not to the movement but to the future of the Catholic revival?
Really very little, except again, an enduring clerical type. He was unbelievably
bigoted, but his bigotry had a certain comic charm. He would cut dead or overtly
insult lifelong friends for petty differences of theology or even for churchly
political divagations. He was unable to recognize the validity of any
intellectual differences with himself. Those who did not agree with him were
both sinful and stupid. Since his intellectual capacities were of the slightest,
this confined his social contacts to a narrow world. Keble did not think of the
materialists and utilitarians and positivists of his day as stupid and sinful.
If he thought of them at all it was very rarely and with a shudder for the
hopelessly damned. His condemnations were reserved for members of the Church who
showed tendencies toward monothelitism and Oxonians who voted for Broad
Churchmen for professorships.

Within his extremely
limited world Keble was a sweet and good-humored man, who loved everybody who
agreed with him and minded him. Can we say he established the type of
simple-minded Anglo-Catholic country clergyman? Perhaps the qualifications are
unnecessary. Keble was just a typical clergyman of any socially acceptable
denomination. Without this type the Church would not have endured past the first
century. Ironically he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a position at least as
respected as the laureateship. He seems to have had no feeling for poetry
whatsoever, and his religious verses show no feeling for religion in the deepest
sense either. Geoffrey Faber, whose Oxford Apostles is corrupted by too
much amateur psychoanalysis, places his finger on a serious defect in all the
leaders of the movement. They wrote terrible doggerel. Newman and Keble had
reputations as poets, Newman even to this day in some circles. The others wrote
occasional verse. Only John Mason Neale, of the more or less independent
Cambridge Catholic revival, who translated an immense number of Greek and Latin
hymns, had any real feeling for poetry whatever. The poetry of Anglo-Catholicism
would not come until Christina Rossetti. Its not just that they wrote doggerel;
if they appreciated poetry they did so for the wrong reasons, wrong even for
early Victorian times.

Richard Hurrell Froude
was the older brother of the historian, J.A. Froude, who early left the movement
for skepticism. Froude again established a type, the young Anglo-Catholic,
interested above all else in outraging the Establishment, who, if a layman,
rattles his rosary against the pew during Holy Communion in a Low Church, and
who, if a clergyman, uses immense quantities of incense and preaches sermons on
the miracle of Fatima and venerates both Pacelli and Charles Stuart, King and
Martyr. When he came up to Oxford from Dartington in Devon, a passionate
sportsman and rider to hounds, his beauty and vitality struck everyone with awe.
Already he was well advanced with tuberculosis. It was probably Kochs bacillus
rather than principle which accounted for the febrile, impassioned, deliberate
defiance of his behavior and his writings. When after his death Newman published
his manuscripts, the Remains of Richard Hurrell Froude, in two volumes,
he caused a major crisis in the Church.

Froude was the only
member of the group who from the beginning was Romeward set, in both theology
and practice, and he was the only one who commonly went to Roman Catholic
services, not only on the Continent but in England. Most of not just the Oxford
Reformers, but members of the Catholic Revival until recent years, never
attended Roman Catholic services. Many of them had, and have, never entered a
Roman Catholic church. Froude was to have many descendants, most of whom would
eventually leave the Anglican Church, from the group of young Turks around
Newman to Father Ronald Knox. A characteristic common to all has been a
compulsive obsession with inconsequentials, as can be discovered by reading
Knoxs A Spiritual Aeneid. Ronald Knox was not the first person of whom
it was said around Oxford that he was two weeks ahead in the Breviary and two
months behind in the Prayer Book, both of which he felt bound in supernatural
obedience to read simultaneously.

Yet had it not been for
the Romanizing tendencies set in train by Hurrell Froude, the Anglican
Church today might still be a rather stark but holy spiritual environment.
Froude was a High Tory of a purely mythological sort, as unlike Disraeli or the
Chamberlains as it would be possible to imagine. He knew that England was
bourgeois through and through, and he was out to épater the bourgeois
with all the ritual and romance and colorful superstition he could muster.

Froude was an actor on a
far wider stage than the narrow parochial and academic one of Keble and Pusey,
the stage of romantic revolt, alienation and rejection of all the values of the
acquisitive society. In some ways he could be called the most influential of the
first leaders of the movement  except that in fact his actual influence pretty
much died with him, to revive as Ritualism after 1850. Its grave danger was its
tendency, especially in controversy, to confuse the instruments of Catholic life
with its meaning, to confuse ends and means. Far more than any of his
colleagues, Froude was aware of the terrible social evils of his time. His
answer was that of a romantic reactionary, but at least it was an answer. In the
next generation it would turn into its opposite. By the middle of the next
century priests would be saying Mass in the streets at sit-ins and
demonstrations.

Newman has been called
not only the greatest, but the only Catholic theologian of the nineteenth
century. He has been called not a theologian at all. He has also been called one
of the founders of anti-rationalism and anti-humanism, along with the Marquis de
Sade, of a line that leads straight to Nechaev, Nietzsche and Lenin. Carlyle
said he had the mind of a rabbit. Many who shared none of his beliefs read him
for the most beautiful English prose in two hundred years, others considered
his style syrupy and evasive. What this all means is not that Newman was a
neurotic bundle of contradictions, but that his was a most complex character; a
personality more sensitive and sophisticated, and a mind broader and deeper,
than his colleagues.

Although he was the
public spokesman  today we could call him the public relations man  of the
movement and its political organizer, his development only paralleled the
movement and eventually diverged sharply from it. Newman was engaged in creating
a new orthodoxy. Keble and Pusey were quite confident they were in possession of
one which only had to be uncovered. Newman was seeking a religion. The others
never lost it. Although he wrote the majority of the Tracts for the Times,
preached and published his tremendously moving sermons, and wrote at least three
theological works that are still of great importance during the years that he
was considered the leader of the movement, his real and enduring influence was
to come later. At the time he was simply over the heads of almost all his
audience. Not least was this true of the little group of young men, children of
Hurrell Froude, or for that matter, de Maistre, defiant, dramatic, jeunesse
dorée of political reaction and romantic Catholicism, obviously Romeward
bound. They entered the Roman Church with him and almost immediately became his
enemies, for their Catholicism was essentially political and esthetic  not in
combination but in compound, esthetic-politics or political esthetics. It is
significant that once they cut loose from the middle-class life of the
Establishment, most of them moved far to the left of Newman.

Bourgeois-baiting was the
last thing in the world Newman was interested in. Although he was the only
middle-class member of the original leadership he scarcely knew the middle class
existed. The very special aristocratic mercantile family-centered life of the
Newmans provides a strong support for the very shakily substantiated notion that
his father was Jewish. Also that his father failed in business after Newman had
enjoyed a childhood in surroundings of quite considerable and very gracious
wealth is significant. The number of great aliénés of whom this is true
is astonishing. An established and thoroughly cultivated capitalist family which
loses its wealth seems to explode and blow its children completely out of the
social pyramid, where they become members of a new aristocracy of the intellect,
a clerkly caste of responsables, suspended outside the class structure.

In the harbor of
Marseille, on his trip to Italy with Froude, Newman may have refused to even
look at the detested tricolor flag on a nearby vessel of the French navy, but he
was not a real Tory, even an archaizing Tory like Froude. He was an anomaly. It
was only after the Established Church, thoroughly Catholicized by the inheritors
of the Oxford Movement, became a refuge for anomalies, that Newman, so to speak
invisibly, returned to it.

In the later nineteenth
century there were probably more philosophical Newmanites in the French Church
than in the English, either Roman or Anglican. The opening of early
nineteenth-century Anglicanism to a large new spiritual world is Newmans
primary contribution to the early years of the Catholic revival. Had it not been
for him the Establishment could have assimilated the religion of Pusey and
Keble. They never realized it, but when Newman left the Oxford Movement he made
it unassimilable. At first it did not leave Toryism. Toryism left it. As the
movement had begun in reaction to a maneuver of the state, so it came to an end,
not with Newmans defection, but with a change in phase in the state. Toryism
became Victorian Toryism. That was something that bore little resemblance to the
high Toryism of the eighteenth century and the Regency, and none whatever to the
idealized Stuart and Laudian Toryism of the old guard of the Oxford Movement.

As a young man the most
dynamic leader of the next generation, Stewart Headlam, listened to but one
sermon of Puseys and found him a crashing bore. Already things had changed so
much that Headlam was unaware that he would never have existed as what he was,
had it not been for Pusey. On this dichotomy and generation gap Newman, safe
across the Tiber, was to have an indirect, underground influence. So it is most
profitable, I think, to treat of Newman by himself, in the much wider, and at
the same time much more intensely personal, context which he created for
himself, and which is his real contribution to the development of doctrine.

Where had all the flowers
gone? After Newman crossed the Tiber, religion, all the rage for fifteen years,
suddenly became unfashionable at Oxford. All the bright young men who had become
Roman Catholics were gone. They could not then be members of the Oxford
Colleges, even had they wished, without provoking the wrath of the
magisterium. As any movement does when suffering a severe tactical defeat,
the Catholic Revival consolidated its position, and operated on interior lines.
It also shifted its base. The stark domestic monasticism which was Catholic
practice as understood by Keble and Pusey survives even to this day, but it does
not provide a way of life negotiable at large in the vast, secularized modern
world.

What had the Oxford
Movement gained? Whatever Parliament or Cabinet or throne might think, it had
freed the Church from its Babylonian captivity as a department of State. It had
returned to the Church its own authority, a collective rather than an absolute
authority, deriving from the traditions of a collective authority  the
Councils of the undivided Church and the Apostolic Succession, the latter a
supernatural community in which Peter and his descendants were only primus
inter pares. It had restored the liturgy to not just decency and order
but to dignity, beauty, and wonder. It had made the sacrament of Holy Communion
central to the life of the Church and of the individual Christian. It had
restored the rites of passage, birth, death, puberty, vocation, eating and
drinking, conversion, sexual intercourse as moments when transcendence, through
the community, suffused and glorified human life.

The sacramental life is
the essence of Catholicism, and holds people to the Church long after they have
ceased to believe in its more indigestible dogmas. After 1845 the sacramental
life was available to any member of the Anglican Church who wished to seek it.
Most specially, the Tractarians, but above all the now so boring Pusey, brought
together their leading principles and merged them in one vision  the life of
faith as lived in, as in air, a transformed world. The Incarnation, the
Atonement, the communion of the saints, the sacramental system, they were all
one being  the living Body of Christ. They presented the Church as itself a
Eucharist. To put it mildly, this was not a common notion elsewhere, least of
all at Rome, in those days, as Newman would find out. Time would come when with
Teilhard and others its full implications would be drawn out  being is prayer.
If I be lifted up, I will draw all things to Me.

The movement made prayer
central to the daily life of the devout Anglican in a different way than the
evangelical movement had done. Prayer was not founded on conversion and did not
culminate in pentecostal possession. It began in penance and moved from petition
to contemplation, and with daily practice left the orant in a habitude of
abiding meditation. This was the state of soul that the doing of Catholic
religion had produced in Nicholas Ferrar's community at Little Gidding, in the
household of St. Thomas More, and in the lives of the medieval secular mystics.
In other words it had restored to the treasury of the English Church its own
special talent, distinguished by its lineaments, and marked with its values.

Incidentally it had
purged Catholic belief and practice of nonessentials  whether Romish or
corrupt following of the Apostles or not. It demonstrated that Catholic life
was possible with collective authority, with a married clergy, alongside of
voluntary celibacy and monasticism, with communion in both kinds, with a
national vernacular liturgy, and without grossly superstitious practices.
Considering the state of affairs in the Church in 1830, this was a tremendous
accomplishment  considering the state of society in 1845 on the brink of
famine, economic crisis, social breakdown, revolution, in the heyday of Liberal
economics and moral hypocrisy. Yet however deep the prayer life of the Catholic
revival, it was still narrow and isolated.

As with so many other
institutions and movements it was 1848, the year of revolution everywhere, that
was to break the shell of Tractarian Anglo-Catholicism. The new force was to
come from the most unexpected quarter, the leaders to be men whom Newman had
looked upon as hopelessly benighted or willfully malevolent. The first edition
of the Apologia Pro Vita Sua started off with an attack on Charles
Kingsley, the Broad Churchman and Christian Socialist, so uncharitable that
Newman, little given in his Anglican days to mercy to his theological opponents,
later suppressed it. Kingsley was a young associate of Frederick D. Maurice and
the Quaker John M. Ludlow, founders of Christian Socialism and English disciples
of Lamennais. Maurice was also the greatest of the descendants of Coleridge and
may have been the leading Anglican theologian of the nineteenth century after
Newmans departure. Even more than Newman he spent his life at the turmoil
center of the most violent controversy, with the significant difference that his
controversies, unlike Newmans, were always foci of ever widening issues, whose
ramifications extended out into, and permeated, the secular society. It is from
Maurice that twentieth-century English Catholic modernism stems, quite as much
as from the Oxford Movement.

John Frederick Denison
Maurice, the son of a Unitarian minister, was raised in a religious environment
of radical Dissent. His early years were spent with Quakers and Unitarians and
he had friends amongst the founders of the Irvingite Catholic Apostolic
Church, all three properly called anti-Protestant Dissent. Ordained in 1834,
by 1837 he had become a sacramentalist, but of his own special kind, and was
looked upon as one of the leaders of the Tractarian movement at Cambridge. As
the Oxford men embodied their universitys authoritarianism, so did Maurice the
empiricism of Cambridge. He was possibly the first Englishman to believe that
Catholicism might justify itself empirically as a way of life without the
support of absolute conviction in the existence of God or the future life or a
revealed Scripture. He himself of course believed, but at least he openly and
consciously admitted religious pragmatism as a reasonable argument. Newman was
of the same opinion, but he so disguised and confused it in his own mind that it
emerges only in the writings of his more radical followers. From Pascal to the
present, those who admit the argument of a purely pragmatic, agnostic
Catholicism seem always to have been those whose own direct mystical awareness
of God was most intense.

To Maurice, Catholicism
was a way of life, lived in the world but over against it, as witness and
catalyst. He took Catholicism as he found it, largely in a purged Roman
practice. He was little interested in an historical continuity with the
liturgics and dogmatic theology imagined for the Apostles. John Mason Neale had
made the study of the great Cappadocian theologian poets popular in Cambridge
religious circles. It is remarkable how much Maurices fundamental conception of
the sacramental life resembles that of the Russian Orthodoxy which descends from
the Cappadocians. For him the sacrifice of the Mass was a temporal appearance of
the eternal sacrifice of Calvary. The cross is central, not in an actuarial way,
but in a metaphysical one not unlike that of the crux and flagrat of
Jakob Boehme and his descendants, Saint-Martin and von Baader. For Maurice the
actual rite, as he said it in a church in a poor slum, was more immediately
symbolized, as it was in Russian Orthodoxy, by the phyloxeny of Abraham. We
offer to God his creatures, and through them ourselves, and He enters the
offering and makes it Himself the embodiment of the absolute act of love. The
three Persons of the Trinity partake of the nourishment offered by a herdsman,
just a wandering Aramaean, under a shade tree at the edge of the desert,
before a tent that smells of camels and sheep and garlic, and of hard-worked men
and women, and the herdsmen partake of Them.

The world is charged
with the glory of God, Turn but a stone and start a wing / Tis you tis
your estranged faces that miss the many splendored thing. Maurice saw the
glory of the supernatural all about him, not least, hovering like the Shekinah
over the tabernacle in the desert, over the slum parishes into which he led the
third generation of young Anglo-Catholic priests, and for which he fought so
passionately. Pusey inspired respect; Keble, affection; Newman, in his Anglican
years, the love of disciples for a master; Maurice inspired simply love, which,
when it is so simple, is supernatural love. We can feel it glowing through the
Victorian prose of his sermons and theological works to this day. His followers
could say with the Psalmist, Lo my cup runneth over, for he opened them up
with his own love, to be filled with the honey and oil and wine of charity,
hope, and faith.

Faith  faith for
Maurice was the Catholic life of supernatural love. He was very little troubled
by the dilemmas of credal belief. For him the mysteries of Scripture or the
Church were images embodying its wonder. Everything was miraculous to his eyes,
most of all the orders of nature and supernature which converge and cross in the
soul of man. So he welcomed the discoveries of science, whether geology,
paleontology, or biology, or the application of the methods of science to the
criticism of the Bible, and was fond in sermons of holding up Darwin as a model
of patience and humility in the devotion to truth. Early in his career he was
deprived of his professorships at Cambridge for advocating a modified
universalism, for expressing the hope that the souls in hell would eventually
cease to be punished and would come to enjoy, not the glory of heaven, but
happiness according to their own lights. Far more than the evolution controversy
and the literal inspiration of scripture, this was the touchstone of
nineteenth-century orthodoxy. Disbelief in a deity, less moral than most men,
who would condemn weak and fallible souls to eternal fire, made one a Broad
Churchman. From then on, his life was a series of controversies and the root of
his trouble was always the same  the catholicity of his life and concern, the
all-inclusiveness of his ideal of Christlike responsibility. For this reason the
main body of the Catholic movement fought shy of him. His popularity was largely
amongst Broad Churchmen until the last years of the century saw the growth of a
conscious Catholic Modernism. He parted with his early Christian Socialist
associates because they were making their movement an exclusive, intolerant
sect.

Stewart Duckworth Headlam
and the group of extreme Ritualist slum priests around him on one hand, and on
the other Charles Gore, head of Pusey House, and then Bishop of Oxford, with the
other contributors to the theological symposium Lux Mundi, represent the
two wings of development of a modern Catholic faith and practice out of the
teaching and example of Maurice. Headlam was certainly an enfant terrible.
In the days when priests were being sent to jail for putting candles and
crucifixes on the altar and wearing chasubles, Headlam, in a series of churches,
St. Johns Drury Lane, St. Matthews Bethnal Green, St. Michaels Shoreditch,
introduced immediately a full assortment of contemporary Roman Catholic
devotions  rosaries, stations of the cross, eventually benediction of the
Blessed Sacrament. Even far more outrageous to the Establishment, he founded the
Church and Stage Guild, welcomed actors and actresses at communion, and got
himself temporarily refused a license by the archbishop for his pains. He not
only introduced public devotions to the Blessed Virgin and high Masses on her
feasts, including the Assumption and Immaculate Conception, he founded and
sheltered in his parish halls the Guild of St. Matthew, the first organized
socialist group in England. Fully as much as Teilhard de Chardin in a later day,
Headlam and the group of priests associated with him welcomed not only the
discoveries of physical and biological science, the immense age of the earth and
the evolution of man, but the destruction by the Higher Criticism of the literal
truth of an infallible Bible. Headlam saw nineteenth-century science as freeing
man for a pure religion suffused by the divine power of Jesus Christ  the Word
of God inspiriting all scientific study, the wisdom in Lyell or in Darwin, the
same wisdom which danced in the Solomonic hymns  the Truth. This was
bourgeois-baiting with a vengeance and helps to explain the irrational
malignancy of Parliaments persecution of the parochial Anglo-Catholic clergy.
God was good to Stewart Headlam and rewarded him with the opportunity to strike
a Christian blow of charity at the Establishment. In old age he went bail for
Oscar Wilde.

Its a wonderfully moving
experience to contemplate the activities of these passionate priests, incense
pot in one hand and red flag in the other, awakening the souls of men in the
smoky, filthy slums of late Victorian London and subverting the Establishment.
Their type of course still exists, and has spread across the world, but they are
the first, and are undeservedly too little known today.

Lux Mundi was the
testament of another world altogether, although it is significant that most of
these Oxford theologians and scholars were Socialists. The old High Toryism of
the Tractarians had withered away. Under the influence of German Higher
Criticism, Broad Church theologians in England had evolved a liberal theology of
the sort that was to find its final statement in Harnack, best represented for
us by Matthew Arnolds Literature and Dogma. The miraculous and the
eschatological passages were shorn from the New Testament. Jesus was called the
greatest ethical teacher who ever lived. This of course was not the historic
Jesus but the Jesus of the liberal historians. Nor was the Church at any time an
association for making men good. An attentive and unprejudiced reading of the
Gospels would convince any outsider that the preaching of the historic Jesus was
saturated with eschatology and that he was emphatically not, in the Liberal
sense, a great ethical teacher. His ethics, based on the imminence of the
Kingdom, would destroy not only Victorian society, but even the noblest
Victorian utopias, altogether. But an eschatological Christ raises the question
immediately of the limitations of his human knowledge. He said he did not know
the hour of the coming of the Kingdom. He quotes from the Pentateuch and the
Psalms and the Book of Daniel with the assumption that they are by their
traditional authors. He apparently believes that the Queen of Sheba really
visited Solomon, and that Jonah and the whale really happened. Reacting to the
blows of the Higher Criticism, the orthodox position, especially the Roman
Catholic, became more and more docetic. The humanity of Jesus became more and
more phantasmal. The suspension of the omniscience and omnipotence of God in the
God-Man became a kind of pretense or even hoax  a position morally
intolerable. We forget that devotion to the Sacred Heart was introduced to
restore the humanity of Jesus to a central place. The devotion increased in
popularity directly in proportion to the mythologizing of its object, until the
Sacred Heart became a Gnostic statue representing a mysterious and inhuman minor
deity.

The essays in Lux
Mundi group themselves naturally around Charles Gores The Holy Spirit and
Inspiration. Gore accepts the Higher Criticism of the mid-century Cambridge
theologians Wescott, Lightfoot and Hort, who had turned the rationalistic
criticism of the Germans against them and had demonstrated conclusively that the
Old and New Testaments were inspired, not literally, but by the guidance of the
Holy Spirit of the fallible and slowly evolving religious capacities of men, to
culminate in the messianic evangel not only of the Gospels and the Epistles but
of Acts  of the life and faith of the infant Church. The message of Scripture
was supernatural, or it was nothing. As presented by Gore, this was not new,
although more radically stated. The novel and still controversial element enters
when he applies the same concepts of evolutionary revelation to the career of
the historic Jesus as the Incarnate Lord. Gore takes over from the Danish
Lutheran Martensons Christian Dogmatics, and from A.J. Mason, the
disciple of Wescott and Lightfoot, the notion that God in the Incarnation
emptied himself of omnipotence and omniscience to become man, in all things like
unto us. The term kenosis, emptying, is derived from Second Philippians
where the kenotic doctrine of the Incarnation is stated most clearly. What Gore
did was to substitute for an irrelevant logical puzzle a new and believable
mystery, the self-limitation of the divine love in incarnation for the
redemption of mankind. No doubt St. Paul believed something very like this, but
the tradition of the Church gives it little support. It is the doctrine of
Origen, but Origen was a semi-heretic.

Bishop Martenson was
relatively unknown in England and the kenotic implications of the Cambridge
theologians had not been noticed. Lux Mundi struck the Church as a
revolutionary document. Its mythological treatment of the Fall and of Original
Sin, its communitarian theory of baptism, and Gores kenosis created
disturbances which are still resounding. At the same time they implied an
entirely new cosmogony and theophany, fundamentally both mystical, and
collective in inspiration. In the kenotic theology God empties Himself out of
omniscience, omnipotence, eternity and infinity into Time, into His humanity,
which is our humanity. In response the Christian soul empties itself into Him,
empties itself into timelessness and so is emptied of contingency. The spiritual
maturity of such a conception moves Christian theology up alongside the
discoveries of the great Christian mystics with whom hitherto orthodoxy had
always been unable to cope. After Charles Gore, who was to develop his ideas in
a succession of books and his mystical vision in sermons and devotion,
Anglo-Catholic theology grows largely around its doctrines of the Incarnation
and the Atonement, defining one in the terms of the other, so that Atonement is
read at-one-ment. Eventually and independently this would become the background
presupposition of the most influential modern theology, whether Frank or
Berdyaev, Schweitzer or Teilhard de Chardin, or for that matter the syncretists
who came into prominence during the Second War and who first popularized in
non-occultist and scholarly terms, the mystical theologies of the Orient. (Alan
Watts is still an Anglo-Catholic priest. Holy Orders is a sacrament conferring
indelible grace.)

The contributors to
Lux Mundi overlapped the turn of the century and the emergence of Catholic
modernism, and the next influential Anglican symposium, Essays Catholic and
Critical, is really a comprehensive statement of the Modernist position,
better organized and more at home in the Anglican than the Roman Church. The
rise of Catholic Modernism, its condemnation and its underground existence and
its eventual emergence, greatly transformed, is another story. By 1890 the
foundations had been laid in Anglo-Catholicism.

KENNETH REXROTH
1973

This two-part essay
originally appeared in Continuum (dates unknown) and was reprinted in
The Elastic Retort (Continuum, 1973). Copyright 1973. Reproduced here by
permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.